✱ Having recently made peace with my reading was one of the best things I’ve done recently. That made me finish my fifteenth book this year, Elven Star, the second part in The Death Gate Cycle series. With only five books to go, even amid November right now, I’m confident about beating my 20 books read goal for 2023.

✱ At work my week was interesting. I finished organizing a benchmarking material soon to be presented to our team. From such material I expect to show some valuable insights and lessons learned. Another thing I did was to work closer with the Value Proposition Canvas methodology, something I had not worked with in years — it proved to be very interesting and potentially useful to a case we are currently working with. But the most interesting thing I experimented with this week was mixing that canvas with an obscure lean methodology tool, called Makigami, that a friend taught me about around 2010, and that seemed like a perfect fit for what we’re trying to achieve. Next week or so I will call some people and show them a mix of these methods to gather feedback. If everything goes well, I’ll implement the idea.

✱ As it happened last September, when even Lucifer was using a fan here in Brazil, an orange alert has been issued this week because of another heat wave strike, that will apparently have its worst temperatures recorded in the Brazilian South region states and the interior of the São Paulo state — where I live —, with temperatures likely passing the 40ºC (104°F) and beating 45°C (113°F). Man, I hate the heat (except for this one), so I’ll try to prepare for this damned thing as best as I can… Heaven help us.

✱ Having decided to catch up with some Family Guy episodes this week, I binge watched the show, which I’m doing according to the season and episode order. This led me to watch S08E17, “Brian & Stewie”, which was different, to say the least. That episode was a special, a 30-minute long episode marking the 150th episode aired of the show. In it, Brian and Stewie (both voiced by Seth MacFarlane, creator and producer of the show) get locked in a bank vault overnight and are forced to deal with each other on a whole new level. There is no opening. There are no cut-away gags nor parallel stories. No music and no other characters show up. Just a deep dialogue about values, life and even a couple of sensitive themes. Given that this show is generally trying to take laughs out of you, this episode is unique and has so many positive user reviews that it’s safe for me to say that a comedic show is perfectly able to be dramatic and impose a more serious tone if the crew wants. Give it a try.

✱ I feel that with the new organization I’m trying to give my site, I have been able to write more often, and this is making me very happy. It’s not so often yet, but more than I usually do. Weeknotes like this, journal entries and notes, these written in Portuguese, and more subject to change over time, all have their own reserved spaces. Ah, there’s also some essays. What worries me most is the way RSS feeds will look like. If you read me via RSS, I could use your feedback. Are notes cluttering your experience?